LKVenia

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Blogger Reverse Publishing

Blogger is disabling S/FTP publishing support from their platform. As of now, they are not offering any solution other than moving the blogs to being hosted by Blogger (either with custom urls or not).

Blogger claims S/FTP will be disabled because a Google infrastructure for doing so is being deprecated and will become unavailable.

In my view, a third option could be put in place that would still allow users to host their own content and not rely on S/FTP on Blogger's side: I call it Reverse Publishing. It works like this:

You use Blogger interface to manage your content, and having selected Reverse Publishing no visible URL is setup for you, but you receive an API key to access all content through GData API calls.

On your server you run a script (PHP most likely) that when activated pulls your blog data through the Blogger GData API and deploys it on your server, essentially doing the same work that the old S/FTP publishing did on Blogger side, just without using S/FTP at all.

If Blogger opts to support that, it could even go so far as to 'ping' your script when new content is available, so it can start pulling it automatically when you publish on the Blogger interface.

I would like to see Blogger staff comments about this idea. If they could enable such an option on their side, I'm sure an opensource script for doing the work on our side could be pulled off quite rapidly.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Using OS X Terminal keys on a Macbook Pro

The default key settings on the Mac OS X (10.5) Terminal are pretty weird, especially on a Macbook Pro, and took me a while to figure them out and setup as I wanted.

This is how it works:

«fn» + left/right arrows is equivalent to home and end«fn» + up/down is equivalent to page up/down

Problem is, by default, these keys don't send escape sequences, and don't work as expected. This is how I setup my terminal keys:

On the Terminal preferences, go to the Settings item, and choose the Keyboard tab.Find these keys and edit them (note that the \033 you can get by pressing the esc key):

End - send string to shell: \033[4~Home - send string to shell: \033[1~Page down - send string to shell: \033[6~Page up - send string to shell: \033[5~Shift page down - scroll to next page in bufferShift page up - scroll to previous page in buffer

These bindings should get you close to what you'd expect from a sane terminal. There are a few more settings I use to setup Bash (and other programs that use readline), which are located on the .inputrc file on your home dir.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Code::Blocks Oblivion

By default it comes with a white theme, while I prefer darker colors for programming. So I put together a color scheme that suits me better, following the Oblivion Tango color theme available in Gedit by default, with a few changes. Here's what it looks like:

If you want to try it, get the file codeblocks_oblivion.conf and use the command cb_share_config to merge it into your ~/.codeblocks/default.conf .